New Year - new look - new plans?

[Galina]

Still getting used to the new look of the forum. Gone are the decorative borders and the colours have changed to blues and greys. But everything seems to be arranged and functioning just as before. It's a bit lonely on here at the moment, there are always guests reading, but few members pop by. Maybe still in winter hibernation?

I guess we are all at the planning stages (except for Templeton down under). Same here, so many pea crosses to follow through to a new, more stable generation this year. Still hoping for that perfect red mangetout or snap, but happy to take good other features too, like the mangetout with many sideshoots that kept producing and producing last year, when others had long turned to crispy straw. Hoping that the tricoloured mangetout 'Emma' will continue with this novel colour trait. And new potatoes (Snookie and HotDog siblings) to try as well as tps from seeds. A couple of experiments to follow up. I really hope to grow a good quantity of Mennonite Stripe beans this year too, these extra long, extra thick, massive, light green, purple striped beans that are so good and fill a pot in no time. My seed donor grows them for seeds only, but they make spectacular green beans too.

Has anybody seen anything new and exciting in the seed catalogues? Not too sure about the aubergines grafted on potato rootstock for a double crop. Does that rootstock really make aubergine growing easier in the UK? What are the plans for this growing year? Has anybody started dusting down their propagator? Plans for breeding? Call me nosy, but I would love to read about your plans
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[Galina]

Ahhh - just clicked on 'grunge' bottom left and the colours changed. Still blue and grey, but with a brown border and the logo is visible in 'grunge' too. And there is the decorative edging back - I like it

Guess there might have been a general colour 'reset' when other changes to the forum were implemented.

[Admin]

a bit late, but just to say we had an update and I think a couple of things got tweaked in the process. I'll try and catch up with things as soon as I can.

[Admin]

Made a start? I wish, I'm still on the looking through seeds at the moment but love your post, getting me interested and I hope to be sowing some seeds before too long

[templeton]

A very late look in from the Antipodes - many plans afoot here.
this summer i had a bit of a hiatus, took a month off for an OS holiday, and it was a wicked December, with lots of 40C+ days - a few things survived on the drippers, but nothing thrived. Came back to harvest red mangetout F2s but everything was dried up, so very hard to score them for colour and fibre. Australian Borderforce have implemented new restrictions on cucurbits, so I've been growing out my stock of Farthest North melon seed to refresh it. I tried to take a year off tomatoes to get rid a debilitating disease in the garden, but couldn't help myself, so put a few in, and the disease is back! drat. El Nino is pretty nasty, apart from under the drippers the garden beds are dust. Means lots of hand watering. Got a bronze fennel project going, a selection of farthest north melons progressing, and some F3 red mangetout seeds planted - its going to be 39C today - in an attempt to sneak in another generation before winter.
T

[Galina]

Thankyou for the update Templeton. Doesn't sound very good. This particular El Nino year provides us all with weird weather. Here nature doesn't know which season it is, everything is flowering really early, but has just got hit with the sharpest of frosts. Fortunately my cherries have kept back flowering, but the myrobalan plums are out and frosted. I see lots of cherries in flower in more sheltered local areas and I don't rate the chances of any fruit setting under these conditions. But 40 and over C is not something we have experience with here. Peas perish long before we get prolonged warm weather. We only get about 2 days in the 30s, always one day in May and one later in summer.

Do you know for sure that the tomato disease will go if you don't grow for a year? What is it? Do others have the same problem?

Hope your red peas will make a generation before winter. I planted some of my red shelling peas for a second generation. Got as far as there is still partial yellow in the pods, the full red shellers did produce (presumably partial) mangetouts, but they were not fully red. Got very inferior seeds on one pod then the gales smashed the plants. Really need to repeat that experiment this spring.

Why the tightening up on cucurbits? Do they stand a chance to survive out in the open? Or is it just a general sort of tightening up between countries. I hear that seeds from the USA are also increasingly being confiscated (and most companies have stopped sending to UK anyway). Makes you cherish what you have and a strong motivation for seedsaving.

Bronze fennel? Is this herb fennel or bulbing fennel?

Stay cool as much as you can, don't envy you all that watering - very hard work. Hope there will be no risk of fire where you are and the weather will get more benign soon.